John Burke, a pastor and author who has studied and examined more than 1,000 accounts of near-death experiences, wasn’t always a believer in the supernatural.
Burke is the author of “Imagine the God of Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Revelation, and the Love You’ve Always Wanted,” but he was once an agnostic skeptical of faith.
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“I ended up studying engineering and working as an engineer,” he told Jen Lilley and Billy Hallowell on the “Into the Supernatural Podcast.” “So my mind has always worked like that. Like, skeptical — ‘How do you know? Is there any evidence? Why does that make sense?’”
Burke continued, “And nobody could really answer my question. So I just decided: ‘Jesus is probably a good man who turned legend and God, you just can’t know. There’s no evidence.’”
But when Burke’s dad was dying of cancer decades ago, he started learning about near-death experiences (NDEs) — scenarios in which people clinically die and have no heartbeat or brain activity yet report consciousness. He first encountered the issue when his father was reading a book about it.
“I saw this book on his bedside table, and I pick it up, and I just am curious,” he said. “I start reading it and I couldn’t put it down. And, at the end, I said, ‘Oh my gosh, like, this might be the evidence I’ve been looking for.’”
The book helped open up his mind, leading him to read and study the Bible.
“After a year or so, for other reasons, actually for fulfilled prophecy in history that I didn’t know was there either, I came to faith in Christ,” Burke said, noting he felt driven to keep studying Scripture and learning.
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As he learned, he discovered, from his perspective, the belief that NDEs line up with what’s in the Bible. And since the late 1980s, he’s studied nearly “1,500 cases of clinical death and resuscitation.”
The commonalities among these stories have stunned him — reports he believes line up with Scripture. Remarkably, he said, upwards of 5% of the population has reported having NDEs.
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